Microchip Pioneer Chuck Peddle, Lead Designer of the Historic 650x Microprocessors, Dies (wdc65xx.com) 56
Long-time Slashdot reader kackle writes:
If you cut your teeth on 8-bit computers during their explosion into the mainstream beginning in the 1970s, you were likely aware of and/or influenced by the work of electrical engineer Charles "Chuck" Peddle, who died this week.
The general public may not know his name today, but his efforts had a big impact on the cost and availability of computing to the average person at the beginning of the personal computer era.
"More than any other person, Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry," Byte magazine wrote back in 1982. While working at Motorola in the 1970s, management had told Peddle to abandon efforts to build an ultra low price microprocessor -- but instead he'd joined MOS Technology, working on the team that designed their influential $25 650x processors, remembers the Computer History Museum. "The most famous member of the 650x series was the 6502, which was subsequently used in very many microcomputer devices (four well-known examples from the consumer market being the Apple II, the Commodore VIC-20, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, the ATARI 8-bit computers and the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers)."
in 2014 Peddle recorded a four-hour oral history with the museum, and earlier this year Peddle spoke at the University of Maine, where he'd earned an engineering physics degree 60 years earlier.
This week in an online remembrance, engineer David Gray remembers "the joy of creating, inventing and innovating with Chuck on and off over a forty six (46) year period... I am missing your indomitable spirit as I write."
The general public may not know his name today, but his efforts had a big impact on the cost and availability of computing to the average person at the beginning of the personal computer era.
"More than any other person, Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry," Byte magazine wrote back in 1982. While working at Motorola in the 1970s, management had told Peddle to abandon efforts to build an ultra low price microprocessor -- but instead he'd joined MOS Technology, working on the team that designed their influential $25 650x processors, remembers the Computer History Museum. "The most famous member of the 650x series was the 6502, which was subsequently used in very many microcomputer devices (four well-known examples from the consumer market being the Apple II, the Commodore VIC-20, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, the ATARI 8-bit computers and the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers)."
in 2014 Peddle recorded a four-hour oral history with the museum, and earlier this year Peddle spoke at the University of Maine, where he'd earned an engineering physics degree 60 years earlier.
This week in an online remembrance, engineer David Gray remembers "the joy of creating, inventing and innovating with Chuck on and off over a forty six (46) year period... I am missing your indomitable spirit as I write."
One, Two, Few, Lot, Many... Too Many! (Score:4, Insightful)
(four well-known examples from the consumer market being the Apple II, the Commodore VIC-20, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, the ATARI 8-bit computers and the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers
That's five, slick.
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Re: One, Two, Few, Lot, Many... Too Many! (Score:3)
A sixth computer that used the 6502 is the original Terminator, if you look at the dumps on the T-800's HUD
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And the youngins might be familiar with it from Futurama, as Bender's CPU.
Terminator/Skynet, Bender, Borg, V'ger whatever happens, it'll probably run on a 6502. ;)
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Oh, who wants a history lesson? It's Christmas.
How about a 16-bit Commodore? Guess what, someone built one.
Specifically NEC, in the Turbo Duo. If you go chip-by-chip through it, looking at pinouts and architecture, you'll find that it's a *direct* successor to the Commodore 128, done in 16 bit.
I've been messing around with a C128 lately out of nostalgia and desire to mod something at the chip level. In seeing if it could be upgraded to 16 bit, I found out that Western Design Center still makes a 16 bit vers
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Misspoke there, it's properly a derivative chip, the HuC6280.
You're not that far off actually (Score:2)
2 slashies (Score:2)
/Bleep, I don't know what I was thinking. Still an 8-bit CPU.
But the SNES Ricoh 5A22 CPU is based off the 65C816.
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Re: One, Two, Few, Lot, Many... Too Many! (Score:2)
It's a shame Commodore didn't design the C128 so the CPU could run at double speed during vblank (and maybe horizontal retrace), while still retaining full VIC-II compatibility. IMHO, it would have made the c128 a lot more competitive by making it easy to enhance c64 games to take advantage of the 25-50% speed boost instead of requiring a total rewrite.
Another interesting possibility would have been grafting a complete c64 into an Amiga in a genlock-like manner. A simple 50-50 mixer between SID & Paula
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Oh, who wants a history lesson? It's Christmas.
How about a 16-bit Commodore? Guess what, someone built one.
Specifically NEC, in the Turbo Duo. If you go chip-by-chip through it, looking at pinouts and architecture, you'll find that it's a *direct* successor to the Commodore 128, done in 16 bit.
I've been messing around with a C128 lately out of nostalgia and desire to mod something at the chip level. In seeing if it could be upgraded to 16 bit, I found out that Western Design Center still makes a 16 bit version of the 8502, the 65C816. Started looking at better DMA, a better MMU, and also who might've used that chip. Turns out, that several hobby projects have managed it--and NEC basically built a production successor to the C128.
The 65816 is also found in the Apple IIgs. ...And the 8-bit-bus variant, the 65C802, is also found in my Apple ][+
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Probably written on a PC with the Intel FP bug ....
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I'd almost think that 4 would fit pretty well into a base two representation, but these days with Intel you just never know.
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No comma after "ATARI 8-bit computers" so they're grouped into one unit of "examples"
Are you trying to start an Oxford comma thread?
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(four well-known examples from the consumer market being the Apple II, the Commodore VIC-20, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, the ATARI 8-bit computers and the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers
That's five, slick.
And they left off the Apple 1, too.
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And also my first personal computer which (of course) you never heard of:
Pravetz 8D was a Bulgarian clone of the Oric Atmos featuring a Bulgarian version of the 6502 processor called CM630, 16 KB of ROM and 48 KB of RAM
inspiration (Score:5, Insightful)
It is very likely that this mans contributions to humanity helped shape my own love for computers and a at least in part lead to my acquisition of a degree in computer science.
I honestly had no idea he even existed before I read this article today.
Thank you Charles Peddle.
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The 6502 was the most common. Just stick with that number.
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https://i.imgur.com/p3uNn64.gi... [imgur.com]
He ranks... (Score:1)
...as an influencer in today's computer driven world up there with:
Grace Hopper, Alan Turing, Robert Metcalfe, among others. It's not that he had the biggest, nor best - but what he did was lay a very solid foundation for others (e.g. Woz) to, quite literally, build upon.
My first computer was a Vic-20 w/ a Datasette.. then on to C=64, C=128, Amiga 2000 before switching to Intel in the early '90's. Man, I loved those old 8-bit machines. Very much like an old points-and-condenser ignition system. Maybe no
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Good to see somebody mention the C=64, probably the biggest seller in the 8 bit computer era. Its 6510 CPU was essentially a 6502 with the first 2 memory addresses used for memory paging.
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At least in the UK, the Ziliog Z80 based 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum released in 1982 was more popular than the Commodore 64. Both the Z80 and 6502 CPUs were important 8 bit microprocessors of the early 1980s. You can still buy brand new 40 pin DIL Z80s which shows you that after 38 years, 8 bit CPUs are still out there.
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Good to see somebody mention the C=64, probably the biggest seller in the 8 bit computer era. Its 6510 CPU was essentially a 6502 with the first 2 memory addresses used for memory paging.
the 6510 also had part of a 6522 PIA grafted onto it.
http://archive.6502.org/datash... [6502.org]
6502 development team site (Score:5, Informative)
The full story and a lot of details about Chuck Peddle and the seven other members of the 6502 development team are at https://www.team6502.org/ [team6502.org]
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RIP, Mr. Peddle (Score:4, Interesting)
All hail (Score:2)
RIP Chuck (Score:2)
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I guess my memory is fuzzy but I thought the 6502 instruction set was a bastardized version of the Motorola 6800... (and somewhat inferior to it), no?
Was 6502 assembly that much better than the PDP-11? I thought the 6800 (and 6502) were all 8-bit CPUs trying to be PDP-11s as much as feasible economically and silicon realestate-wise.
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The 6502 and 6800 are very similar, and the dies look pretty much the same. The 6501 was designed by people who had worked on the Motorola 6800, and was effectively a 6502 made to be pin compatible with the 6800 (supposedly with the help of confidential Motorola design documents). This resulted in Motorola filing a lawsuit which was later settled with MOS paying damages and the 6501 processor being scrapped. Ah, the early days of the computer industry when IP laws weren't as cut-and-dried as today.
The PD
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The 6502 is actually not that "primitive" when you understand its programming model.
After all it has 128 16 bit register. A novelty at that time. Yes, you are supposed to use the so called zero page as abstraction for 16 bit registers and the X/Y registers index registers.
On top of that it had BCD arithmetic ... how many super smal processors had that?
For those who are not into the topic, the address range from 0 -FF was called the zero page, a 64k address space had 256 pages. The first one, starting with a
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At any given technology node, the Z80 and the 6502 were very close in processing speed. The 6502 was a more clever design, the Z80 had powerful features like a dual register set and more instructions.
Don't be confused by clock frequencies. The Z80 used a clock twice as fast as the 6502, but took twice as many cycles to execute the same sort of instruction.
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6502 assembly code is great -- unless all of the first 256 bytes (page 0) addresses have been used by the system.
So many of the most powerful 6502 addressing modes are indirections through page 0 that if that memory is already committed then it becomes *much* more of a pain to program in assembler.
Re:Greatest chip designer of all time. (Score:4, Informative)
He invented what might be the greatest architecture of all time: the 6502, which is an absolutely amazing chip to use even today. It puts all the other assembly languages I've used to shame. I didn't even know assembly could be that good before the 6502. He was a legend. RIP, he'll be missed.
I beg to differ [wikipedia.org].
Didn't understand why people hated assembly (Score:5, Interesting)
the 6502, which is an absolutely amazing chip to use even today. It puts all the other assembly languages I've used to shame. I didn't even know assembly could be that good before the 6502.
I didn't know assembly language could be bad since I started on the 6502. Then did PDP11 assembly at school. Then started on the 68000. Then 8086 and I learned why so many people hated assembly.
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If you think that the x68 assembler is bad, you really should take a look at the PDP8 assembler.
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You are at risk of reigniting the 8-bit wars between the Z80 and the 6502 ;-)
The Zilog Z80 is an off shoot from the Intel 8080, later the 8080 evolved into the 8085 then 8086 then 80286 now known as the x86 family.
In many ways, the Z80 is superior to the 6502 because the Z80 used a CISC instruction set that included operations such as block copy instructions written in microcode. Effectively, the Z80 could block copy memory from A to B in a single instruction so was like pseudo DMA operations. However, the
More than just the 8-bit era (Score:2)
I found out about his death a few days ago from an Amiga forum. I also found out recently that while the Amiga 1000 used a Motorola 68000 as its main CPU, it also used the 6502 for the keyboard controller.
I liked the 65020 (Score:2)
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Re: I liked the 65020 (Score:2)
The "486" (really, 386 & beyond) actually had a nice, orthogonal assembly language... the problem was, entering 386enh mode to USE it circa 1990 meant losing the ability to call BIOS & DOS, which was a VERY nontrivial problem back then... it raised the bar to the point where you couldn't even read the keyboard or use a serial port without having to re-implement literally EVERYTHING yourself. Win32, DPMI, DOS4GW, Linux, and OS/2 were all still off in the future, and affordable alternatives to DOS for
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Charles Peddle's 6502 was an inspration for ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
The ARM processor, which is the dominant microprocessor for low-power devices, is an indirect descendant of the 6502.
An insightful report [theregister.co.uk] by The Register explains, "[Sophie] Wilson's affection for the 6502 also took them, in October of 1983, to the Western Design Centre in Phoenix, Arizona, where Bill Mensch was working on a version of the chip that would support 24-bit addressing.
The place was a revelation. As [Steve] Furber recalls: 'We went there expecting big shiny American office buildings with lots of glass windows, fancy copy machines... And what we found was... a bungalow in the suburbs... Yeah, they'd got some big equipment, but they were basically doing this [enhanced 6502] on Apple IIs.' ... As Wilson tells it: 'A couple of senior engineers, and a bunch of college kids... were designing this [enhanced 6502] thing... We left that building utterly convinced that designing processors was simple.'
Simple? IBM's own commercially unsuccessful first attempt at a Risc processor had taken months of instruction set simulation on heavy mainframes. Wilson, however, just plunged right in. Herman Hauser remembers: 'Sophie did it all in her brain.'"
In other words, the visit to the Western Design Centre, where the enhanced 6502 was being developed, helped Sophie Wilson to realize that a simple yet powerful processor can be designed and implemented by her small team of 3 engineers. She did not need the army of H-1B visa holders that Intel uses. She and her 2 British colleagues (Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser) were sufficient if she made the instruction set architecture (and its implementation) simple.
A benefit of simplicity is low-power consumption. The first incarnation of ARM consumed so little power that it could operate with only the leakage current of the logic circuit to which it was attached.
Another perspective of 6502 and ARM appears in the transcript [computerhistory.org] of an interview with Sophie Wilson.
Thanks for killing the horrid IBM future (Score:2)
If was not by you and your almost unbelievable chips, we would most likely be stuck in a hell of terminals and mainframes forever.
Some people *AHEM* Google *AHEM* still to revive that awful idea, but you gave us what we needed to fight it back.